not me being depressed 🥺

Reflecting on a near year of sadness and how we become the news that we read.

Hello paid supporters! I was initially going to do an almost-end-of-year check-in via Google Form but stopped because…it seemed annoying, like too much, etc. So! Some housekeeping! If you feel strongly about the current paid posts and what you’re getting, please respond and let me know. Do you like them? Do you hate them? Do you want more? Less? Anything specific? Share, as I’m figuring out how to tweak things for the new year.

The one specific item that I’m considering adding that would be an ~exclusive~ paid item is a new Thursday interview series, my answer to something like

Embedded

’s My Internet or

Perfectly Imperfect

’s interviews (but a different approach, largely based around defining taste and those who shape culture in very specific ways). These would be for paid, unlike the Tuesday posts, which can fluctuate. If you are strongly for against, etc.: let me know.

On with the show! Thank you, angels!
krf

PS. Gift a subscription to a friend too <3

A year ago, I was depressed. Like, very, very depressed.

As is the nature of this newsletter, posts are roughly 50% a reflection of the world and 50% a reflection of my life, everything filtered through the prism that is me, these dispatches ideally a rainbow upon thine cheek. Sometimes this professional-and-personal balance can be more direct (Hello, friendship apps!) or more abstract (Hello, day job frustrations!) but there are always clues that, if you applied the teachings of your high school literature teacher, you could find some cries within the not-so-subtle subtext: “We are in an especially cruel moment,” I wrote in October 2023;  “We’re looking for permission to not-look-good and to not-have-thoughts!” I wrote in August 2023; “The fight, fight, fight cycle of the news and politics – Of everything!! – is too exhausting,” I wrote in July 2023, in a post titled “LIFE SUCKS IDGAF ABOUT ALIENS!!! 😭.”

Perhaps the most obvious cry was a post titled “🐶🍷🩺 COPE CULTURE LET'S GOO 🩺🍷🐶” from September of last year, which went on to explain —

There’s a new conversation rising, particularly with therapy: have we hit the limits of these things? Therapists are crying, sharing that they can’t help patients with the way the world is. The burnout talk is evolving to how our coping mechanisms no longer work. Everyone is annoyed by the language of trauma. What the relationship between these three things show is how modern (adult) life is a whack-a-mole of coping: everything is a coping mechanism in a time when everything is unpredictable. Sure, life has always been this way – but have we always been exposed to all this news? Were people in other times in more cohesive settings, where they were more apt to listen and help each other? Were we less insulated and alone?

This doesn’t sound that depressing, per se, but it was very much when I was reaching a sort of “last straw,” which I’m living in the echo of now, finally able to speak about these things and dissect them so that I’m not “doomed to repeat” this situation, so that I can learn from my personal history. I can attribute this complicated sadness to three things, all of which is tied to the impermanence of life, to being in transition, to things you may or may not have gone through — or that you can expect to go through: your body changing as you age; the (forced) ephemerality of people and place; and being in the waiting room of your own life.